Elizabeth Boott Duveneck (American painter) 1846 - 1888
Elizabeth "Lizzie" Otis Lyman Boott was an American artist. She was the daughter of the classical music composer, Francis Boott and Elizabeth (née Lyman) Boott. She married Frank Duveneck, her former teacher, and lived in the Villa Castellini in Florence. Boott was born on April 13, 1846 in Boston, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of the classical music composer, Francis Boott and Elizabeth (née Lyman) Boott. Her mother, who died when she was 18 months old, was the eldest daughter of a Boston Brahmin, George Lyman and his first wife, who was the daughter of Harrison Gray Otis. Boott studied at the William Morris Hunt class for women in Boston, and with Thomas Couture outside Paris when she (and her father) spent a summer of study with Frank Duveneck, an artist she and her father admired, in Munich. On March 25, 1886, in Paris, Boott married Duveneck. Following their wedding, they lived at the Villa Castellani with her father. Their son, Frank Boott Duveneck, was born on December 18, 1886. He became an engineer and married Josephine Whitney, the daughter of Henry M. Whitney. She lived later in Paris with her husband and son. She died there on March 22, 1888, of pneumonia. Her memorial in Allori Cemetery in Florence was created by her husband's friend from Cincinnati, Clement Barnhorn in 1891 Boott encouraged her teacher Frank Duveneck to move to Florence, with the idea of having him teach a class of women artists - instruction of a sort that was just then coming into vogue. In the fall of 1879, after nearly a decade in Munich, Duveneck moved to Florence and more than a dozen of his painter friends came with him. They settled at the Villa Castellani, now the Villa Mercede, at Bellosguardo, designed in the 15th century by a follower of Michelangelo and owned in the 19th by a Boston family, who rented out to friends the spacious apartments that surrounded the villa's arcaded center court. It became a magnet for a lively group of male and female art students, and also attracted the attention of author Henry James, who wrote about her and her father's time at Villa Castellini in his novels, Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl. Her first show was held in Boston at J. Eastman Chase's Gallery. Source: Wikipedia * * * Frank Duveneck (American painter) 1848 - 1919 The son of German immigrants, Frank Duveneck received his earliest art training from an apprenticeship with a church decorator in Cincinnati, across the river from his birthplace, Covington, Kentucky. Desiring further study, he went to Munich in 1869, at the time second only to Paris as a center of art instruction. Duveneck became a leading exponent of the so-called Munich School, which emphasized unsentimental realism, a dark palette, rapid brushwork, and rich impasto, all derived from old masters such as Rembrandt, Hals, and Velázquez, and modern realists like Courbet and Manet. Duveneck's prime contribution to American art is the adaptation of this bold, painterly, anti-academic style into a truly American form. Duveneck painted "The Turkish Page" in the Munich studio of his colleague William Merritt Chase, who based a painting on this scene as well. Although Duveneck's painting was recognized as his most ambitious - and a technical triumph - when it was exhibited in 1877 at New York's National Academy of Design, the work's lack of narrative focus in favor of a still life treatment, and the unidealized depiction of the emaciated child, perplexed viewers. However, by the time of its display at the Pennsylvania Academy's 1893-94 annual exhibition (from which it was purchased), greater acceptance of cosmopolitan styles and subject matter had secured Duveneck's critical reputation as an American old master.
